If you take a look at the Radio Survivor home page today you should see something a little different. There are some things missing: banner ads.
Thanks to fourteen Radio Survivor readers like you, we surpassed our first Patreon fundraising milestone of $100 per month. That gives us enough regular funding to get rid of banner ads while still paying our basic expenses like internet hosting.
This is really the kind of fundraiser where every dollar from every contributor adds up and gets us closer to sustainability, and growing the depth and breadth of our coverage. Please take a look at our Patreon page and consider giving just a dollar a month to help keep Radio Survivor going.
We’re looking forward to hitting our next milestone of $500 per month, which will allow us to end Amazon affiliate links and ads. To be clear, we aren’t necessarily wholly against banner ads and affiliate sales. Although, because of the nature of Google Ads, we had little control over the actual ads that readers see, yielding the occasional question or complaint.
The most important reason for replacing them is that relying on banner ads and affiliate sales as our main sources of funding has been an unpredictable up-and-down affair that makes it difficult to plan for growth, never mind sustainability.
Another real downside is that to make enough money to truly grow requires attracting significantly more traffic (by factor of at least 10x). The risk is that the kind of stories that bring lots more eyeballs aren’t necessarily the ones that our most dedicated readers say they want to read. We certainly want to grow readership of Radio Survivor, but we prefer to do it in an organic way that’s based on constantly improving how well we serve radio enthusiasts day-in and day-out, rather than by trying to figure out what vaguely radio-related link-bait will work.
We’re betting the Radio Survivor community prefers us to focus on the issues, stations, people and stories that matter, too.
We love to hear from you. Please let us know how we’re doing, and if there’s something else we should be covering.
And, as Bartles and Jaymes famously said, “thank you for your support.”
